Community Round-Up: March 2021

As we finally head into spring after a long and difficult winter in lockdown, we are gearing up for a few exciting and unmissable events – our first user conference SquaredUp Live in April and the well-loved SCOMathon in June!

This month’s community highlights include: results and expert analysis for The Big SCOM Survey, Cookdown’s four methods to send SCOM alerts to ServiceNow, Thomas Maurer’s discussion of the features and benefits of the Hotpatch for Windows Server Azure virtual machines, and Billy York’s demonstration of how the Azure Application Change Analysis can track changes to Azure Resources.

In other SquaredUp news, our new product Dashboard Server is now available – you can now dashboard anything (not just SCOM and Azure), for free! Check out our Tips & Tricks and Dashboard Server Learning Path series to get the most out of the tool.

SCOM

Don’t miss SCOMathon 2021!
SquaredUp and Cookdown have been working hard to make this year’s SCOMathon bigger and better than before. With an impressive line-up of well-known SCOM wizards, this is the one SCOM event you don’t want to miss this year.

The Big SCOM Survey – Results and expert analysis
See what the SCOM community thought of SCOMathon Workshop Week and what else we have in store!What’s the future of SCOM? How do others set up their SCOM landscape? What tools are SCOM Managers using? The answers are all here! See our key findings complete with expert analysis.

SCOM 2019 Post UR2 Security Hotfix information
This blog by Kevin Holman discusses the Post SCOM 2019 UR2 Hotfix. See his workaround for users who are behind on agent Update Rollups because pushing these updates can be time consuming.

How to build a ServiceNow Incident Connector for SCOM
If you want to synchronize your alerts with your incidents, view issues in real-time, and generally make your life easier, connecting Microsoft SCOM and ServiceNow is a no-brainer! Let Cookdown break it down for you step by step.

Secure your Infrastructure Monitoring with SCOM
Recent high profile cyberattacks and an increased focus on customers’ security concerns have led the SCOM team to include enhancements to many security related features in recent SCOM update rollups. See the features here.

Four ways to send SCOM alerts to ServiceNow
If you work with SCOM and ServiceNow, you’d be familiar with the fear of missing a critical infrastructure alert. See Cookdown’s four handy ways to fully synchronize your alerts and incidents for the lifetime of an issue!

Improvement in reliability of SCOM Linux monitoring
Until the release of SCOM 2019 UR1, individual Linux agents would randomly 'grey-out' in the SCOM Ops and Web Console. Read this helpful article to find out how to solve this problem.

Azure

Hotpatch for Windows Server Azure virtual machines
Hotpatch for Windows Server Azure VMs is one of the new features for Azure Automanage announced at Microsoft Ignite. Thomas Maurer, Senior Cloud Advocate at Microsoft, walks us through the new feature.

Azure Application Change Analysis
Microsoft MVP and Azure expert, Billy York, discusses the Azure Application Change Analysis and shows us how it can track changes to Azure Resources, particularly your App Services.

Azure Bicep, Deployment Script and Role Definition Code
Azure MVP Tao Yang discusses deploying custom Role Definitions in Bicep, now that Azure Bicep is officially supported by Microsoft and has a more stable language syntax.

How to sync between two Azure files shares for Disaster Recovery
Charbel Nemnom, Microsoft MVP and Cloud & Security Architect, shares how to sync between two Azure file shares for Disaster Recovery in two different storage accounts.

Monitor your hybrid network with Network insights
Network monitoring often entails searching across dashboards to find monitoring data, leading to frustrating troubleshooting delays. Check out Network insights – a centralized console for network monitoring and troubleshooting.

Become a Kusto Knight!
Check out the first blog in a new series by Gianni Castaldi, Security Engineer at Wortell. He discusses the latest detections and covers the basics of KQL, where it comes from and what it does.

SquaredUp

Three reasons not to miss SquaredUp Live!
Last month we announced our first user conference – SquaredUp Live! If you haven't registered, here are three things you won't want to miss: the keynote by SquaredUp CEO Richard Benwell on his vision for unified IT observability, analyst insights from Gartner's Senior Director on how observability, AIOps, and business insights are changing the meaning of IT monitoring, and exclusive new product demos!

The public preview of SquaredUp Dashboard Server goes live!
Want an enterprise dashboarding tool that’s quick, simple, and effortless to maintain? You need SquaredUp Dashboard Server! Dashboard Server functions independently of SCOM and Azure and introduces a new PowerShell tile. Now, you can dashboard virtually any data.

Dashboard Server Key Features
See the product’s key features. You can now connect to just about any data source you can imagine and build beautiful dashboards in just a few minutes!

Getting Started with Dashboard Server
Get a quick tour around Dashboard Server, plus handy sample dashboards that show you exactly what you can do with the product!

Dashboard Server Learning Path
Embark on a learning journey with our Tech Evangelist Sameer as he learns all there is to know about Dashboard Server.

How to embed Grafana visualization in SquaredUp
Following our previous blog on Grafana and SquaredUp, we look at how we can leverage Grafana for the visualizations and data sources it offers, but also give them more meaning by embedding them in SquaredUp.

Working with the WebAPI tile – tips & tricks
Regardless of the SquaredUp product you use, the WebAPI tile is very useful when it comes to connecting to external data sources and showing them in your dashboards. Check out our best practice tips!

Community Answers

High CPU usage when using database Compatibility Level of SQL 2019
Have you noticed extreme CPU usage on the SQL server when upgrading the Compatibility Level of the Operation Database to SQL 2019? Know how to solve this issue? Share your ideas with the community!

SCOM agent – No alert received for full C drive space and server down
Shekar’s SCOM agent doesn’t alert for full C drive space or a server that is down, despite the SCOM agent being healthy and not MM. Do you have any tips for identifying the root cause?

Duplicate MSDTC Service is stopped
Do you have any ideas as to why SCOM sends duplicate email alerts and the MSDTC Service is stopped when restarting the servers? If so, please share them with the community.

SCOM Alerts to Elasticsearch
Has anyone built a connector to send SCOM Alerts to Elasticsearch or a Syslog system? Share your tips and tricks to share with the community!